Henry sets up our expectations with the first impressions of the town, then brings them shattering to the ground with the big twist ending. They're in for a rude awakening when the town (or at least its most prominent citizen) proves a lot smarter than they thought and ends up taking them for the proverbial ride.īesides being a statement about the American character, Summit also serves a significant role in the pacing of the story. More importantly, they think such towns are safe, and 'Summit couldn't get after us with anything stronger than constables and, maybe, some lackadaisical bloodhounds and a diatribe or two in the Weekly Farmers' Budget' (3).

Sam and Bill don't think much of these kinds of towns, full of 'inhabitants of as undeleterious and self-satisfied a class of peasantry as ever clustered around a Maypole' (2). Henry has his own idea about what these towns are like-the sort of place where a kid like Johnny can run wild-and about how much more knowing they are about life than people sometimes attribute to them. It could be the Wild West or upstate New York or anywhere in between what's important about it is its 'small townness,' that kind of Norman Rockwell close-knit community that, for many people, defines what it is to be American. The story is set in Alabama, but it's really more about the time than the place.

The ransom of the red chief story